Wednesday: This feels like Thursday.
Mar. 2nd, 2011 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinNews For Today
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later... I set incentives based on what I think is within reach, but in a lot of cases that's just my best guess. I guessed that fifty tweets in 24 hours would be within reach, but it was closer to 25. Now I have a benchmark for next time.
It's probably for the best, as I don't know if I'll be able to get a chapter up today. Seguing directly into Personal Assessment, I didn't sleep well again last night. Because you all made the effort, though, I'll make the effort. I do have a bit of a head start, and maybe I'll feel more awake/alive/human after food, pills, and a bath.
Dreams From Last Night
Indistinct yet troubling.
Random Link
Amanda Hocking is a self-published author who sells 100,000 books a month. Yes. People are doing it. They're getting rich doing it. She has no trad-pub credits to give her the kind of respectability/attention/whatever it supposedly takes to make something like that work. At this point it's pretty obvious she could be trad-pub'd, if she wanted to be... but why would she want to be? What's a publisher going to do for her in exchange for the chunk of her money they would take? According to her blog, she's sold the foreign rights to some of her books herself and has a movie deal.
What's a publisher going to do for her that she hasn't done for herself?
Obviously not everyone who takes her path can succeed on the same level as she has, but that's the way anything goes. I can picture the trad-pub apologists stepping up to say that she's an anomaly, she's an exception, as if their industry isn't built on the hope of being an exception and isn't supported by the efforts of the exception.
The difference is that if you don't go trad pub and you are the rockstar superstar exception, you keep all the money yourself. It doesn't go to subsidize the entire industry and underwrite all the failures. And if you're not the exception... well, you're not a failure that needs to be written off. If you make $500 a year from your book, that's $500 in your pocket and a good start, not a failure.
Andrew Sullivan linked to her with the heading The Death of Book Publishing, a title that reveals his traditional bias: she is publishing books. Even if she sounded the deathknell for traditional publishers, it wouldn't be the end of publishing or the end of books. But I really don't think traditional publishers are going away within the lifetime of anyone living today. They are useful. Having a formalized process--no matter how fucked up it sometimes becomes--for getting something done is useful. But I do think that more and more they're going to be seen as an option, not necessarily the first choice or the last resort of authors who want to be published and read.
And I especially believe they're going to be seen as a less-attractive choice for authors who know they have what it takes and who want to actually see some damn money for their work.
(Yes, I'm a little cranky today.)
Plans For Today
Wake up. Write.
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later... I set incentives based on what I think is within reach, but in a lot of cases that's just my best guess. I guessed that fifty tweets in 24 hours would be within reach, but it was closer to 25. Now I have a benchmark for next time.
It's probably for the best, as I don't know if I'll be able to get a chapter up today. Seguing directly into Personal Assessment, I didn't sleep well again last night. Because you all made the effort, though, I'll make the effort. I do have a bit of a head start, and maybe I'll feel more awake/alive/human after food, pills, and a bath.
Dreams From Last Night
Indistinct yet troubling.
Random Link
Amanda Hocking is a self-published author who sells 100,000 books a month. Yes. People are doing it. They're getting rich doing it. She has no trad-pub credits to give her the kind of respectability/attention/whatever it supposedly takes to make something like that work. At this point it's pretty obvious she could be trad-pub'd, if she wanted to be... but why would she want to be? What's a publisher going to do for her in exchange for the chunk of her money they would take? According to her blog, she's sold the foreign rights to some of her books herself and has a movie deal.
What's a publisher going to do for her that she hasn't done for herself?
Obviously not everyone who takes her path can succeed on the same level as she has, but that's the way anything goes. I can picture the trad-pub apologists stepping up to say that she's an anomaly, she's an exception, as if their industry isn't built on the hope of being an exception and isn't supported by the efforts of the exception.
The difference is that if you don't go trad pub and you are the rockstar superstar exception, you keep all the money yourself. It doesn't go to subsidize the entire industry and underwrite all the failures. And if you're not the exception... well, you're not a failure that needs to be written off. If you make $500 a year from your book, that's $500 in your pocket and a good start, not a failure.
Andrew Sullivan linked to her with the heading The Death of Book Publishing, a title that reveals his traditional bias: she is publishing books. Even if she sounded the deathknell for traditional publishers, it wouldn't be the end of publishing or the end of books. But I really don't think traditional publishers are going away within the lifetime of anyone living today. They are useful. Having a formalized process--no matter how fucked up it sometimes becomes--for getting something done is useful. But I do think that more and more they're going to be seen as an option, not necessarily the first choice or the last resort of authors who want to be published and read.
And I especially believe they're going to be seen as a less-attractive choice for authors who know they have what it takes and who want to actually see some damn money for their work.
(Yes, I'm a little cranky today.)
Plans For Today
Wake up. Write.